Landscaping and lawn maintenance: what to do???

Question

I’m rehabbing my 3rd SFH and plan to hold as a rental. My goal is to outsource busy work so I can focus on financing and finding deals. One sticky widget I need advice on: what about basic landscape maintenance??? Specifically gutter cleaning, leaf clean up and weed maintenance. Is this something a property manager can do? Do you hire landscaper? Advice please!

Nick Giulioni · Answer

I really think that we got off on the wrong foot and I apologize for that. You can go look back at all of my posts and they are largely very positive about investing overall (particularly out of state using property managers). I was just indicating that this is something that should be done by the property management companies if you get a competent one.

I used a very large and reputable property management company who I subsequently fired because of their poor performance. I wish I had done more research on them - but it was when I was just starting out and I didn't know better.

It is not my intention to get into any type of adversarial conversation with you or to scare anyone off from investing in real estate with property managers.  It's been the single best decision I've made in my financial life.  Everyone should just make sure to do their due diligence on PMs.

I hope you have a great rest of your weekend!

Theresa Harris · Answer

@Gideon Blustein  If you have a good property manager, talk to them as they should have a list of people who they hire to do this and it should be part of their regular maintenance.

James Wise · Answer

Again, fixing the tenant's repairs is a revenue source for a Property Management company. Just like landscaping is a revenue source for a Property Management company. Property Manangers make money selling you repairs, landscaping & the monthly management fee along with a slew of other things. Pizza companies make money selling you Pizza. Dell makes money selling you computers, Apple makes money selling you the Iphone.

If you would like to discuss your issues with this company you used in the past you'll have to go pretty deep for it to develop into a productive conversation. What you are doing right now isn't productive to anyone. You are just going online & advising new investors that a big thing they need to worry about is all of the big bad scary property managers who won't cut the owner's grass or fix the repairs for the owner. That is a nonsensical fear to have because again selling you both of those things is how the company makes money.

Perhaps you didn't use an actual management company. Perhaps you were scammed by a random guy on Craigslist who took your money without managing the property. Perhaps the company wasn't willing to fix the items needed for the amount you wanted to pay. Perhaps you didn't hold enough money in the management company's escrow account. Perhaps the tenants lied. Perhaps the tenants didn't lie. Can't say as you haven't given any details. All I can say is what you are advising others isn't a reasonable or plausible risk to be concerned about.  If you'd like to talk about your specific situation lay out the details here & we can go from there.

Nick Giulioni · Answer

There’s a ton to the story - how deep do you want me to go? They were more than willing to take my money on a monthly basis, but wouldn’t answer repair calls from my tenants, took weeks to respond to me, and took the photos of the properties on terrible tablets.

Overall highly recommend getting reviews from current customers before signing on with a PM.

James Wise · Answer

You've worked with a full fledged Property Management Company who refused to take your money? I am not buying it. There has to be more to this story.

Gideon Blustein · Answer

@Nick Giulioni thanks, Nick. I’ve got a great property manager that I’m very happy with. One of the challenges we’ve run into is finding a reliable worker to do this stuff, but I’ll make a run at it!

Nick Giulioni · Answer

I've had several bad experiences. Very happy with current one though.

Jason D. · Answer

@Gideon Blustein not sure if you asking if they will do the work or hire out the work. No, they wont do the work. Yes, they will certainly schedule maintenance to be done

James Wise · Answer

Yes a management company can handle all of this for you. When you hire a large management firm they take care of all of this for you. So you won't need to reach out to contractors, landscapers, painters or any of that stuff.

James Wise · Answer

Not sure why people think that there are property managers out there that avoid doing this work for their clients. This type of work is a revenue source for the management company. A more accurate concern would be that the owner doesn't want to pay for the services. I mean I've never seen a pizza place try to avoid selling pizza's to their customers. Same thing here.